Neighborhood Activism in Context:Three Studies of the Neighborhood Antecedents and Individual Effects of Participation in Neighborhood Activism.

[摘要] In a July 13, 2009 speech, President Barack Obama emphasized ;;neighborhood-level intervention” as a priority of his Office of Urban Policy. The President’s experiences organizing neighborhoods and his policies of neighborhood-focused solutions have created an opportunity to build our understanding of the effects of community interventions. Despite decades of neighborhood-based work, knowledge from this kind of community practice is rarely incorporated into urban sociology—especially into the line of research known as neighborhood effects. Neighborhood effects research has documented the negative effects of neighborhood inequality; this dissertation demonstrates the protective capacity of community practice.I synthesize scholarship on community practice and urban sociology to ask: How does neighborhood activism affect individuals and neighborhoods? Despite the early ties between social work and urban sociology, knowledge from these two disciplines is rarely shared. Social disorganization theory, an early theory that still dominates the urban sociology literature, suggests that poor neighborhoods lack social organization. More recently sociologists have argued that social organization is present in a variety of neighborhoods and protects against neighborhood disadvantage. Community empowerment theory, which informs much of community-level social work practice, suggests that activism in disadvantaged neighborhoods can address inequality. In this dissertation, I bridge these perspectives to examine the effects and antecedents of activism by analyzing secondary data on residents and neighborhoods in Chicago. This dissertation is comprised of three interrelated manuscripts which examine the multilevel processes of neighborhood activism. First, I find that participation in neighborhood activism positively affects individual psychological resources. Second, I explore the neighborhood antecedents of participation in activism, specifically testing competing theories of the relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and this under-researched form of social organization. Residents are more likely to engage in activism in neighborhoods that are more stressed and more disadvantaged. Finally, I find that activist neighborhoods have a positive effect on psychological well-being for all but first generation immigrants. I find significant, unexplained variation in how neighborhoods affect immigrant mental health, suggesting questions for future research. This dissertation will add to the research base for community practice, advance theory of the social context of mental health disparities, and inform neighborhood interventions.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Activism

[关键词] Neighborhoods;Activism;Participation;Chicago;Illinois;Mental Health and Well-Being;Social Work;Sociology;Social Sciences;Social Work and Sociology